Friday, July 27, 2018

An apartheid Israel

Mise agus Seanadoir Frances Black

Two weeks ago I attended the launch in Kilmainham Prison
of the Centenary Exhibition of the life of Nelson
Mandela. The exhibition was a testimony to the extraordinary
courage of Mandela and to those in South Africa, and in the African
National Congress, who struggled for freedom and equality inside and outside of
south Africa. It was also a reminder of theobscenity of the National
Party’s system of apartheid or so-called ‘separate development.’

The Apartheid policy was one of the great evils of the 20th century.
It allowed the white National Party government to exercise control
over the people of south Africa. Its roots were in the colonisation
of south Africa by European powers, including the British. The policy
began to take formal shape in the years after south African
independence in 1910. The 1913 Land Act, gave legal status to
territorial segregation. Native Africans were forced to live in designated
areas. Thirty-five years later when the National Party took
power it began enforcing existing racial policies under a new system
of laws it called apartheid or separateness.

Divide and conquer is a tactic as old as war. Under apartheid
non-white south Africans were forced into separate areas with separate
facilities. All south Africans were classified by race – Bantu (black
Africans), Coloured or mixed race, Asian and White. The regime’s
objective was to maximise white control and minimise non-white political power.
In a later modification of this policy the Apartheid
government established 10 Bantu homelands. All black south Africans were
citizens of one of these Bantustans. In this way the south African
regime could claim that there was no black majority in south Africa. It
was a huge gerrymander.

Between 1961 and 1994 three and a half million black south
Africans were forced to move into one of the Bantu homelands. Their
land and water rights were then sold cheap to white south Africans. Eighty per
cent of south African land was designated solely for white use and under the ‘pass
laws’ non-white south Africans had to carry documentation proving that they
had a right to be in a white only area. It took 50 years of
struggle to end the obscenity of apartheid in south Africa.

Today, while South Africa has other challenges, apartheid is a legacy
of the past. In the Middle East it is part and parcel
of the present; of the daily life of Palestinians living under
Israeli occupation. Last week a deeply divisive law was passed
by the Israeli Parliament which declares that only Jews have the right
to self-determination. Under this legislation Israel will expressly
promote a Jewish character and for the first time
Palestinians living within Israel will officially be reduced to the status
of second class citizens. The law “viewsthe development
of Jewish settlement as a national value, and will act to encourage
and promote its establishment and consolidation”.

Israel’s apartheid policy is most visible in the occupied
territories. One of my abiding memories from my visits to the Middle
East in recent years and especially to the west Bank, wasthe enormous
scale of the Israeli settlements. Almost all occupy the high
ground like Crusader forts of an earlier conflict.

There are over 200 settlements with an estimated 600,000
Israeli citizens. These are all built illegally, in contravention of
international law and United Nations resolutions, on occupied Palestinian land
from which Palestinians have been forcibly removed. These settlements are
serviced by roads which are for the exclusive use of Israeli
citizens. Large swathes of the countryside are off limits to the Palestinian
people who own the land.

The wire fences of the Israeli Army stretch for
kilometres across the landscape. Water rights have been stolen
by the Israeli authorities. The separation wall – a monstrous
construction of hundreds of kilometres of concrete and wire, snakes
through the region stealing Palestinian land and surrounding and
cutting off Palestinian towns. In addition, permanent Israeli military road
blocks, similar to those which used to blight the border counties
from Dundalk to Derry, prevent Palestinian citizens and their elected
representatives from travelling freely between Palestinian towns and villages.
Palestinian owned lands are deliberately separated from each other.

The result is that an estimated sixty per cent of the west
Bank, which should be the core of a Palestinian state, is
off limits to Palestinians. The similarities between apartheid south
Africa and apartheid Israel are plain for anyone to see.

Apartheid as a policy by Israel was further reinforced last
week when the Israeli Parliament also passed the second and
third reading of the so-called Breaking the Silence
Bill. Thepurpose of this legislation is to provide the Israeli
Minister of Education with the absolute authority to ban any
organisation or individual he believes is acting against the state of
Israel from entering an educational institution. The law is
specifically aimed at the group Breaking the Silence
which is made up of former Israeli soldiers. It publishes testimonies from
soldiers who served in the occupied territories. It aims to encourage
debate and discussion about “the daily reality of the occupation
and Israeli military rule over thePalestinian civilian population in the territories
… we aim to generate opposition to the occupation through meaningful
public debate on the significant moral price paid by Israeli society
for entrenching the ongoing regime of occupation”.

According to Breaking the Silence (www.breakingthesilence.org.il): “The law, in its current form, will stifle human rights
organizations' educational activities within educational institutions in
Israel, and it imposes sanctions on anyone who does not present the official
position of the Israeli government in foreign frameworks."

Regrettably, the reaction of the international
community to this current apartheid system has been largely muted and
ineffective. One positive response has been the recent decision
by the Seanad in the Irish Parliament to pass a Bill, introduced
by Seanadóir Frances Black and supported by Sinn Féin, including Seanadóir
Niall O Donnaghaile and others, to ban the import
of farm produce and other material produced by Israel’s illegal
settlements on Palestinian land. Trading in goods that are the product
of stolen property is wrong.The Bill now moves to the committee
stage. It is opposed by Fine Gael but if successful it will act as an example
to other states to take firmer action against illegal settlements.